Stella Creasy: Labour's rising star who's taking on Wonga

Walthamstow's MP is not only an old-style street campaigner, but also embraces fully the power of Twitter. Her recent brush with the loan company is typical of her refreshing approach to politics. No wonder she's seen as a future leader

It was shouting at sheep that made Stella Creasy want to be an MP. As a sixth-form student in Colchester, she went with a group of friends to the Brightlingsea docks to protest against the exportation of live animals, in this case, sheep.

It was 1995. Local elections were taking place at the same time. If the Labour group on the council got enough votes, the teenage Creasy realised, they would also control the port and be able to make the changes they wanted. She argued the point with her friends. Creasy recalled thinking: "'Well, hang on, OK, we can go and shout at the sheep, but we can also achieve the changes we want to.'

"It brought it home to me that it's important to have both [activists and parties]. You couldn't just write a strident letter about it or make a poster about it, you had to get stuff done."

Getting stuff done has become Creasy's mantra in the intervening years. At the age of 35, the MP for Walthamstow is one of the brightest hopes of the Labour party. Elected in 2010, she has gained a reputation as one of Parliament's most doggedly effective campaigners. In a field populated by career politicians guided by self-interest, Creasy is that rare thing: a woman of conviction.

"One of the challenges for politics in future is that it's not about 650 people all acting individually," she told the Observer on Friday. "It's about trying to do things together."

Her sustained protest against "legal loan sharks" (payday loan companies and pawnbrokers who charge interest rates of up to 4,000% to people who struggle to get credit elsewhere) has gained cross-party support and led to her being named campaigner of the year at the 2011 Spectator Threadneedle Parliamentarian of the Year awards.

Her continued criticism of such companies provoked some vicious abuse on Twitter. Creasy was called "mental" and accused of being a "raving self-publicist" by a man calling himself @DanielSargant1. After an investigation by the Guardian, it was revealed that the anonymous tweeter was an employee at the controversial payday loans firm Wonga.

Creasy returned online unabashed. She is one of the few politicians to have understood the strengths of Twitter as a mobilising force and had 21,390 followers at the last count. Her popularity on the social networking site (recent tweets have revealed her love of malt loaf, Babybel cheese and the singer George Baker) has raised inevitable comparisons with the former Tory MP and inveterate tweeter Louise Mensch. But Creasy's concern for her constituents goes beyond clever public relations or mere political rhetoric.

"The stuff she does in Walthamstow is genuinely good," says the former Labour cabinet minister James Purnell. "The way she goes about being MP is based on having a conversation with her constituents rather than, 'Elect me every four to five years and then I can do what I want.' She starts from her opinions and then works out how to bring them about. She's human, she's not an automaton."

It is true that Creasy has a keen grip on local issues. She is a vocal opponent of the scheme to redevelop Walthamstow dog track as a housing and leisure complex and her criticism of the proposal to turn the nearby Grade II listed cinema into a church led to her being depicted as a bikini-clad Barbara Windsor on a Carry On themed campaign poster.

Yesterday, Creasy was co-ordinating a free family finances fair which provided information and support for Walthamstow locals on utility bills, job hunting, money management, housing services and food preparation. Free massages were also on offer. Little wonder, perhaps, that her nickname in the House of Commons is "St Ella".

Creasy was born in Sutton Coldfield, the daughter of politically active parents. Her mother, Corinna, was head teacher of a special needs school and her father, Philip, was an opera singer. She spent her early years in Manchester before the family moved to Colchester, where Creasy went to a girls' grammar school.

She joined the Labour party at the age of 15, displaying a precociousness that would become her hallmark. When Tory MP Bernard Jenkin came to speak at her school, Creasy asked so many questions, including one about why tampons were subject to VAT, that her head teacher threatened to throw her out for disruptive behaviour. One of her passions as an adolescent was indie music and she recently wrote the sleeve notes to accompany a vinyl edition of Seamonsters, an album by the Leeds indie guitar band the Wedding Present.

In an extended essay published last week, Creasy revealed that she couldn't listen to the song Blonde "without thinking of the boy who I fell for on a dance floor many years ago, only to discover myself to be one of many taken in by his charms".

After school, Creasy studied social and political sciences at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and then worked as a parliamentary researcher for Douglas Alexander and Charles Clarke while completing a PhD in social psychology at the LSE.

Sir Ross Cranston, the former Labour MP for Dudley North and now a high court judge, was one of the politicians she worked for.

"Stella was great," he says. "She was enthusiastic and full of ideas. She could quite easily have had a successful academic career. But her interests were always practical: how public policy actually works and the impact it has. And she was also concerned with improving people's lives."

Creasy was elected to Parliament at the age of 33 on the back of an all-women shortlist, a policy she remains in favour of, saying that their existence "helps deal with an entrenched view of what politicians should be".

She cut quite a dash during her first months in the House of Commons and was once turned away from the members-only lift by a Conservative minister who refused to believe "this blonde woman" could be an MP because she looked "too young". Creasy has spoken out in the past about the amount of abuse faced by female politicians online and has recently thrown her weight behind the One Billion Rising campaign against sexual harassment and domestic violence.

Unmarried, she has a long-term partner she jokingly refers to as a "hab" (husband and boyfriend) and her circle of friends revolves around a group of fellow Labour politicians; she used to take part in pub quizzes with Neil Gerrard, her predecessor as MP for Walthamstow.

"We actually had to stop competing against each other because we were too competitive," Creasy admits. "I'm the kind of person where it's fine for me to be on your team as long as I get to hold the pen."

The only criticism that anyone levels at her is that she seems too good to be true. "I just think: what is there wrong about her?" says one acquaintance. "I want to say to her, 'You seem very certain but how can you be so certain about things and what if you're not?'"

And yet, her colleagues and friends talk about the fact that she is "very human" – no mean feat for a politician. According to one, she has shown "a bit of courage to stand up against the regime"; apparently, the whips weren't keen on her legal loan sharks campaign to begin with but Creasy defied them. She is already being tipped for the top. Catherine Mayer, the Europe editor of Time magazine sees her as "Labour's leader in waiting".

"She's certainly the type of politician one hopes we are bright enough as an electorate to want at the top," says Mayer, who makes it clear she is speaking apolitically and not as an indication of how she votes. "She's seriously clever but not – like so many seriously clever men – lacking in human understanding. She's engaged but not doctrinaire or tribal."

Is Creasy destined for the political firmament? More than 20,000 Twitter followers seem to think so. If she carries on doing what she has set out to do, the chances are that this bright and focused 35-year-old will prove herself not just Stella by name, but stellar by nature.